An PSH flood is a DDoS attack designed to disrupt network activity by saturating bandwidth and resources on stateful devices in its path.
By continuously sending PSH packets towards a target, stateful defenses can go down (In some cases into a fail open mode). This flood could also be used as a smoke screen for more advanced attacks. This is true for other out of state floods too.
PSH Packets are considered an illegal packet by the Original TCP RFC. While it left room for customized behavior it is virtually unused today. Thus different systems can react differently to these packets and may cause unexpected issues and behavior.
Technical Analysis
Below an analysis of an PSH flood is shown. The following images depict a high rate of PSH packets being sent from a single source IP towards a single destination IP.
In Image 1 below, you can see the flood of PSH packets coming from a single source. Notice the rate at which the packets are sent.
“Image 1 – example of single PSH packet being sent to port 80”
As seen in Image 2 the capture analyzed is 14 seconds long and the average number of packets per second are at 118, with a rate of around 51Kbps. Attack rates could be much higher.
“Image 2 – PSH Flood stats”
A typical PSH flood running against an unsuspecting host will look similar to the above analysis. Generally what is seen is a high rate of packets (not preceded by a TCP handshake).
Analysis of an PSH flood in Wireshark – Filters
Filter PSH packets – “tcp.flags.push”.
Goto Statistics -> Summary on the menu bar to understand the rate you are looking at.
Download Example PCAP of PSH Flood
*Note: IP’s have been randomized to ensure privacy.
